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Paper short abstract:

In the late 1930s, prominent Japanese male authors published several texts narrated in a young woman’s voice. The paper analyzes the literary performance of the opposite gender within the changing landscape of colonialism, militarism, censorship, and the redefinition of masculinity that followed.

Paper long abstract:

Performing femininity has been one expectation of Japanese female writing since the re-definition of literature under Western influences during the Meiji Restoration. Major women writers such as Higuchi Ichiyō crafted a modern literary language perceived as distinctively “female,” as opposed to the neutrality associated with the masculine voice of the new genbun itchi-style. Seki Reiko defines such literary forms as josō buntai, “writing in female drag,” underlining how female voices emerge following “normative feminine expressions created [...] to represent femaleness” (1997: 144). This paper addresses the shift in gender performance that happens when male writers perform femininity through the use of josō buntai. With Kawabata Yasunari’s articles in the female magazine Fujin kōron in the late 1930s and Dazai Osamu’s Schoolgirl (1939) as starting points, it examines the role female voices played in the literary rivalry between the two men in the context of a changing discursive regime. The Mukden Incident and the Literary and Artistic Renaissance (bungei fukkō) of the mid-1930s had transformed social and literary discourses under the influence of colonial expansion, militarism, censorship, and the redefinition of masculinity that followed. The paper analyzes how the literary re-enactment of an immature type of femininity became a criterion of success for two already established male writers. It asks two main questions: can the appropriation of female voices by male writers be understood as an act of silencing women or giving them exposure? And how does this gender performance fit within the changing political and literary landscape of 1930s Japan?

Seki Reiko. Kataru onna-tachi no jidai: Ichiyō to Meiji josei hyōgen (The Times of Narrating Women: Ichiyō and Female Expression During Meiji). Tokyo: Shin’yōsha, 1997.